The Republican Party’s ratings now stand at a 20-year low, with just 33 percent of the public holding a favorable view of the party and 58 percent judging it unfavorably, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Although the Democrats are better regarded (47 percent favorable and 46 percent unfavorable), the GOP’s problems are its own, not a mirror image of renewed Democratic strength.

Americans’ values and beliefs are more divided along partisan lines than at any time in the past 25 years. The values gap between Republicans and Democrats is now greater than the one between men and women, young and old, or any racial or class divides.

The party’s base is increasingly dominated by a highly energized bloc of voters with extremely conservative positions on nearly all issues: the size and role of government, foreign policy, social issues, and moral concerns. They stand with the tea party on taxes and spending and with Christian conservatives on key social questions, such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

These staunch conservatives, who emerged with great force in the Obama era, represent 45 percent of the Republican base. According to our 2011 survey, they are demographically and politically distinct from the national electorate. Ninety-two percent are white. They tend to be male, married, Protestant, well off and at least 50 years old.

And yeah, racism is a key factor:

Quote:

During Obama’s first term, ethnocentric attitudes — on immigration, equal rights and interracial dating — grew by 11 percentage points among conservative Republicans but did not increase significantly among any other political or ideological grouping. Some academic surveys found similar partisan polarization on racial measures over the course of Obama’s first term.
[...]
To the conservative base, Obama, as an African American in the White House, may be a symbol of how America has changed. Unease with him sets conservative Republicans apart from other voting blocs — including moderate Republicans, who have hardly been fans of the president. For example, a fall 2011 national survey found 63 percent of conservative Republicans reporting that Obama made them angry, compared with 29 percent of the public overall and 40 percent of moderate Republicans.

Role of the right-wing media in creating an perpetuating a fantasy world:

Quote:

If a values backlash and racial-political polarization helped forge the staunch conservative bloc, the conservative media has reinforced it.

The politicization of news consumption is certainly not new; it’s been apparent in more than 20 years of data collected by the Pew Research Center. What is new is a bloc of voters who rely more on conservative media than on the general news media to comprehend the world. Pew found that 54 percent of staunch conservatives report that they regularly watch Fox News, compared with 44 percent who read a newspaper and 30 percent who watch network news regularly. Newspapers and/or television networks top all other news sources for other blocs of voters, both on the right and on the left. Neither CNN, NPR or the New York Times has an audience close to that size among other voting blocs.

Conservative Republicans make up as much as 50 percent of the audiences for Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’ Reilly. There is nothing like this on the left. MSNBC’s “Hardball” and “The Rachel Maddow Show” attract significantly fewer liberal Democrats."

When your base is largely people 50 years old or older who don't like blacks, mexicans, gay people, gays who want to get married, hetros who shack up together, people who sleep in on Sundays, women and their vaginas, etc., the party literally has one foot in the grave.

My dad and father in law are on the front edge of the baby boomers and both of them are getting noticably older and more feable each time I see them. Both complain about taxes and government and declining values; while both collect social security, medicare, and VA benefits they earned dammit. I guess unlike the rest of us who've been paying 20 years into the system they're draining and simultaneously hoping to kill to spare the future generations.

__________________
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.

I guess unlike the rest of us who've been paying 20 years into the system they're draining and simultaneously hoping to kill to spare the future generations.

Ponzi Schemes work just like that

__________________
"There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian."(Murray N.Rothbard)
"Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue."(Ayn Rand)
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"(Margaret Thatcher)

Funny you should mention Ponzi schemes. I've always thought of libertarianism as a Ponzi scheme.

You see, in a Ponzi scheme, there really isn't any actual product or service that is being sold. The way that money is made is by attracting more unwary suckers, charging them a fee, and then turning them into a zombie army that goes out and recruits more unwary suckers.

In the domain of political philosophies, that process sounds a lot like libertarianism. You know - because libertarianism doesn't actually have any working examples of success. It's all in the minds of its followers; a promise without any actual fulfillment. But then, to try and prove that they are legitimate, libertarians go out and attempt to recruit young people (usually at college age) who don't have a lot of life experiences and who haven't been exposed to economics or history. Just like a Ponzi scheme would do.

And then once they get those people suckered into the movement, their primary assignment of these new recruits is to go out and find more people for the movement. But still, there is no actual product or service to demonstrate the real-world application or success. These recruiters for libertarianism hope that nobody will ask THAT difficult question, just like a Ponzi scheme hopes that nobody notices that they don't have a real product.

So yeah, libertarianism is a Ponzi scheme. It has the cult-like mindset of Dianetics. It's the political equivalent of a multi-level marketing scheme like Amway, only without the snazzy advertising.

Oh, and €200.

__________________In the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie...

Last edited by Sauron; 03-23-2013 at 06:53 AM.
Reason: Because this welcher AML still owes us €200.

As filmmaker, Jen Senko, tries to understand the transformation of her father from a non political, life-long Democrat to an angry, Right-Wing fanatic, she uncovers the forces behind the media that changed him completely: a plan by Roger Ailes under Nixon for a media takeover by the GOP, The Powell Memo urging business leaders to influence institutions of public opinion, especially the universities, the media and the courts, and under Reagan, the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine.

I have a big spreadsheet that I use for tax planning. It includes variables for all of the tax-relevant events that might affect my tax liability, so I can adjust them all and forecast tax implications before I do anything. Each year in November or December I go ahead and make a new tab for the following year.

Yesterday was kinda gray and rainy so I did my 2018 updates. In addition to current law, I made tabs for the House and Senate plans. And hooray, I will get a small tax cut, I guess. Maybe 2-3% of income. A little more if I build in a bonus and sell some stock.

I also do not need tax relief.

I plan to use the windfall to accelerate converting retirement assets that are currently tax-deferred into tax-free retirement assets. I already do this each year depending on the top marginal rate, but I will just do more of it next year.

The Republican Party has all but officially declared its motto to be: "Screw the Middle Class and Poor; we're all about making the rich even richer -- meanwhile, we'll use appeals to racism and religion to keep you distracted from how thoroughly we're screwing you over."

As this article argues, the GOP has been all about "trickle-down economics" for over a century now, despite the fact that it simply doesn't work as advertised.

The current GOP tax plan -- no doubt deliberately -- will have a disproportionately large effect on people in "blue states." No doubt, plenty of voters in redder states will be in favor of it for that reason alone.

I think our modern GOP really owes its existence to Reagan. It was Reagan, after all, who popularized the notion that "Government is the problem" and used that mantra to aggressively push programs that directed government services away from helping the poor and middle class and toward making the rich ever richer. And the Reagan Administration proved that if you demonize the opposition while using religion and racism to keep people distracted and divided, you can get away with a policy that blatantly and openly favors the interests of the rich over those of everyone else, while slashing programs that help the middle class and poor -- and not only can you thus avoid an open revolt by the poor and the middle class, but a great many of them will just love you, even as you're screwing them over.

[Just go to any news article about Roy Moore, for example, and read the comments from the legions of people who loudly declare that they'll proudly and happily vote for Moore -- no matter what he might have done -- over any "Demoncrat."]

It's really quite brilliant of the GOP. They have done an excellent job of convincing so very many of the people they're screwing over most thoroughly to love them for it. It's evil, of course -- but quite brilliant.

__________________
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”

I think our modern GOP really owes its existence to Reaganthe racist backlash to the Civil Rights Act. It was Reaganthe fact that the federal government enforced anti-segregation laws and rulings, after all, [that] popularized [among racist white people] the notion that "Government is the problem" and [the GOP] used that mantra to aggressively push programs that directed government services away from helping the poor and middle class and toward making the rich ever richer.

I don't think Reagan deserves the credit. Nixon started the Southern Strategy, and Reagan's approach just was the natural continuation.

Before the stretch of Truman*-LBJ, the federal government was a willing enforcer/abettor of Southern white supremacy. After the Warren Court and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the federal government began dismantling the Southern system of white supremacy (it did, however, largely leave the Northern-style system of white supremacy intact). It's natural that they would turn against "government".

*With the racial progress obviously largely backloaded in that stretch

That's a very good point. I seem to remember reading somewhere that when LBJ signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he said: "This will cost us [the Democrats] the South for a generation." He was being optimistic, it seems.

ETA: From Wikipedia's page on the Southern Strategy, here's Nixon's political strategist, Kevin Phillips (from a 1970 New York Times article):

Quote:

"From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."

__________________
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”

Yes. Nixon is the correct source and Phillips was one of the architects of the Southern Strategy.

Phillips would rue his astute measure of the vox populi and rant against the results in his 2006 tome, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, which I highly recommend to anyone with sufficient blood pressure medication to read it.

I do wonder what ol' Kevin might have to say about the shitgibbon. I'll have to look around.

Reagan didn't invent it, but he did perfect it. One of the things I found interesting is reading about the architects of Reagan's policies and comparing that to the experience I had growing up in the 80s.

The explicitly racist policies were sold as preserving law and order to otherwise non-racist conservatives and conservative-minded "Reagan democrats". Race (except in dog whistle form) didn't even enter into the mainstream discussion in my recollection - the war on drugs was a war on crime, not a war on minorities, in the discussions on the news.

In 1957, Rev. Alvin C. Horn, of Talladega, AL, resigned as Grand Dragon of the KKK in Alabama because he, being 45, married 15 yr. old Barbara Richardson of Trenton, GA. He lied and said she was 20. The KLAN IN 1957 thought that was wrong (from Montgomery Advertiser, 1961). pic.twitter.com/BPzMTGBMSu

Do you think there is some republican campaign manager sitting in a backroom somewhere, feeling a bit stunned and giddy, going "Fuck it. Get me a retired circus bear, an electric shaver, and some bluetooth speakers with some random right-wing talk radio quotes set to repeat. We need to find out how far we can go with this."

I have plenty of friends, relatives, and acquaintances who stoutly (and very loudly) insist that:

tax cuts to the wealthy will make things better for the poor and middle class

that the Environmental Protection Agency exists for the sole purpose of "killing jobs"

that there is some kind of "War on Coal"

that "Clean Coal" is not a contradiction in terms

that there's no evidence for Anthropogenic Climate Change (and if the climate is changing, then that's a good thing)

that Whites (especially White Males) are somehow an oppressed underclass in our society

that our country was founded by God-fearing Christians who intended it to be a Christian theocracy

that what we really need are more guns in the hands of private citizens

that Black Lives Matter is a racist hate group

that we'd all be living in a magical utopia where the air is clear, the streams are sparkling and clear, everyone is rich, there are plenty of pristine wilderness areas teeming with wildlife, there is no such thing as crime, poverty, racism, sexism, or pollution, etc., etc., -- if only we'd get rid of all those onerous regulations that are tying the hands of Big Business, which wants nothing more than to create this utopia and make us all happy

etc, etc, ad nauseum

There's exactly zero evidence for any of these claims, of course -- and indeed, there's plenty of evidence against them.

Some time ago, I noted that most of my fervently Republican friends, colleagues, and relatives employ exactly the same "logic" that Creationists do when espousing their beliefs. In other words, it's pure faith on their part; reason has nothing to do with it. And, in my experience, trying to have a discussion with the average Republican voter is exactly like trying to have a discussion with a Creationist. Since their beliefs are entirely faith-based and have nothing whatsoever to do with reason or actual facts, attempting to employ either facts or reason is a waste of time -- and if anything, will only anger them.

Obviously, not all people who support the modern GOP are doing so because they've drunk the Kool Aid. Some of them, no doubt, are perfectly aware that many of the current GOP's positions are deeply irrational and often openly anti-intellectual. But, of course, if they have a personal interest in convincing people to support these positions, they're hardly likely to point out how very harmful many of these policies may be.

Coal is clean enough, what do you want them to do, take it out of the ground and wash it first?!

All claims that can be traced back to the same basic media set. Frankly on either side it seems a good marker for if someone is a political extremist, or in a cult, is whether they get their news from a small group of interconnected sources and think anyone outside this group is a paid off liar or from a large variety of sources and only mistrust them once ample evidence builds.

At this point I've kinda just started asking for them to explain themselves, it often quickly runs out or in the case of the internet ends up with them calling me names and going home.

I can't read that Forbes article as the site wants me to disable my adblocker. Not happening. Ever. I refuse to ruin my web browsing experience by subjecting myself to intrusive advertising (all advertising is intrusive).